Garrett Dahlke is 9 and in the fourth grade at Loy Elementary, where about 90 percent of students have parents in the military.

His dad is in the military, and Garrett says he knows a lot of other active duty military and veterans, too. He says thanks to them as often as he can. It's important because "they're still serving our country," he said.

But even Garrett admits that he and others could say thank you more often.

Talking to veterans and listening to their stories is another way to acknowledge and appreciate their service, he said.

Students at Loy celebrated Veterans Day on Tuesday with an assembly that had students and their families packed into the room that serves as their cafeteria and gymnasium.

Students read to the crowd who their heroes were and sang patriotic songs such as "Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue" and "This Land is Your Land."

Col. Tom Wilcox, 341st Missile Wing commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base, sang along for some of the songs.

He was the guest speaker and one of his children also attends the school that shares a fence with Malmstrom.

Veterans and those serving in the military are heroes, Wilcox said about the students' parents.

Military kids, he told the students, are heroes, too.

"You have to move and that's serving your country, too," he said.

Students who don't come from military families are also heroes since they befriend the military kids who often face new school jitters, stress of deployed parents and other challenges that come along with being a military kid.

"Did you know there are boys and girls in the world who don't go to school," Wilcox asked.

"What?" was the collective reply from the students.

Wilcox talked about American freedoms that have been earned by generations of military members and said that even though the base was closed for Veterans Day, about 400 people were still serving in the missile field Tuesday.

All of the students at Loy are also heroes in another way, Wilcox said. Each day they go to school and learn and do well "so you can grow up and take care of our country."

He gave the students an assignment to go home and thank the veterans they live with or call the ones they know to say thanks for their service.

Earlier in the day, staff and volunteers at the Great Falls Rescue Mission were thanking veterans there and in the community at a free luncheon.

Jim Kizer, director at the mission, said that about 25 percent of their clients are veterans and that they're seeing more younger veterans and those with families.

"We don't just feed this veterans day meal one day a year," Kizer said and that one way for the community to thank veterans would be to support the mission in their work to feed, clothe and house veterans, and others, who have fallen on hard times.

Kizer is also a veteran who spent more than two decades in the military.

Most of the volunteers serving the meal at the mission were also veterans or tied to the military. Most volunteers were from Malmstrom and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Gary Wolrehammer has been in Great Falls since the early 1990s. He served in the Marine Corps for four years and loved it, he said.

He also grew up in an Air Force family.

He lived at the mission for awhile and then left, but fell on hard times and came back to the mission.

He shared the Veterans Day lunch with people he said he shares a camaraderie with.

"Some of these guys are my best friends," Wolrehammer said.

Though it was cold and the roads were icy Tuesday morning, veterans gathered in the lobby at Centene Stadium for the annual ceremony hosted by the Montana Veterans Memorial Association.

The ceremony included the dedication of benches that had been installed at the Blue Star Marker, just east of the memorial on River Drive.

Kathy Austin said the benches were donated by the Rainbow Garden Club and Great Falls Flower Growers.

The Blue Star Memorial program is a project of the National Garden Clubs and began in 1944 when members planted 8,000 Dogwood trees in New Jersey as a living memorial to World War II veterans. The next year, the project became a national initiative and since that time has been installing markers along the Blue Star Memorial Highway system.

During WWII, the blue star became a symbol seen on flags and banners in homes to indicate that a son or daughter was away at war.